AppScale: The Secret Weapon for Product Managers

Product Managers (PMs) today must be "Jacks (or Jacklyns) of All Trades" -- adept at a wide variety business and technology roles within a company, in order to manage multiple products from inception to phase out. Given intense time-to-market pressures, PMs must also be agile and adaptive to be successful.

AppScale is a PM's assistant. It facilitates software and feature integration, it helps a PM manage risk effectively, and it automates many of the PM responsibilities. Since this sometimes gets lost in the AppScale buzz that surrounds Devs and Ops, we thought we'd take a moment to bring out some of AppScale's features that have turned the PMs of our customers into Super Stars!

Feature Integration. AppScale adds flexibility to any product roadmap by facilitating integration of new and legacy features and technologies. It does so by allowing customization of the execution environment of your applications (apps). If your customer requests Shibboleth login support, your Devs can add such support by simply installing Shibboleth within the environment (e.g. container, virtual machine). As new libraries and tools emerge that you wish to integrate into your apps, you can add these to the platform as well. If your customer has legacy code to which they want your app to interoperate, you can do so by linking the two within the AppScale platform. By being able to customize the platform, you can tailor not only the app, but also the environment in which the app runs, to your customer's needs.

Risk Management. AppScale enables you to "test drive" new features for your apps with lower risk. Because AppScale inherits the highly productive development model of App Engine and provides fast and easy application deployment, the platform makes it easy to evolve your app over time. Your Devs can rapidly prototype new features and deploy them using isolated instances of the app so that you can get feedback on them from your customers directly. In addition, if you want to deploy your app where Google isn't (i.e. China) to test its potential within the China market, AppScale makes it possible (without requiring any changes to the app). Finally, AppScale enables you to perform cost analysis of new features quickly using different cloud infrastructures so that you can prioritize your roadmap.

Automation. The speed with which products and features can be developed and deployed using AppScale will help you get your innovations in front of customers faster and close deals sooner. The way AppScale does this is through automation. Automatic management of all of the services and technologies in your app's ecosystem, app deployment, and monitoring. Hawkeye monitoring for example can help you understand how your products are used by your customers and thus when sunsetting opportunities arise. In addition, Hawkeye helps you understand how your resource needs will grow as you add new features and new customers. Finally, automation allows you to move products and features from proof of concept to testing to production seamlessly.

In summary, AppScale is an integral part of the agile development toolbox of our customers that not only improves the lives of Devs and Ops but also of Product Managers. At AppScale, we constantly strive to turn the platform into a tool that makes everyone involved in the software development lifecycle more innovative and productive. If there are AppScale features or support that you need to take your game to the next level, do let us know.